Work trip to Leverkusen, Germany - 26th to 27th October 2006

A flying visit to Germany, to see a client in picturesque Leverkusen, which is near Cologne. Leverkusen of course is famous for Bayer Leverkusen, and not much else. After a nightmare flight over to Frankfurt, I collapsed straight into bed when I arrived.

Getting to Leverkusen from Frankfurt is about a 200km journey, which happened in a new Mercedes B Class car, driven by a German colleague. I really got to experience the fact that there are no speed limits on German motorways, with a hair-raising ride there and back. It veered between sitting in a traffic jam, to routinely getting up to 200kph (that's about 125mph). Exciting stuff, occasionally stupidly dangerous, but a good journey nevertheless.

On the way back to Frankfurt, we made a stop at McDonalds by the motorway - where the McRib seems to be permanently on the menu. Far from being like the French and Spanish, who shun such bad food, the Germans are incredibly like us English, they are "lovin' it" - pretty much every big motorway exit has a McDonalds about 2 minutes away, which you can usually see from the motorway thanks to a huge M on a very tall pole.

The trip was over pretty quickly, I got to see Leverkusen's stadium which looked pretty spectacular, and a good experience at high speed on the Autobahns.